


A Saint of Misery Is Still a Saint

by kattastic99



Series: In Death Are You Redeemed [6]
Category: RWBY
Genre: Adam Taurus Redemption Arc, Adam is kind of a little bit extremely bigoted against humans, Black Markets, Domestic Violence, Kinda, M/M, Sexual Humor, Smuggling, Speakeasies, a little bit of, except not really? its retaliation not assault, for not paying your debts, in front of your wife and kids, innuendos, not the sad kind the kind where someone beats you up in your house, references to casual sex, uhhh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:47:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27592928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kattastic99/pseuds/kattastic99
Summary: Adam Taurus is hired to settle a debt for the smugglers he freelances for, and finds that the situation is perhaps not exactly what he'd been given.
Relationships: Adam Taurus/Original Character(s), Adam Taurus/Original Male Character(s)
Series: In Death Are You Redeemed [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1993420
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	A Saint of Misery Is Still a Saint

Despite it all, Adam did not consider himself to be a smuggler. His primary method of making money was still breaking and entering into Atlas elite households and either stealing lien directly, if he could find it, or stealing valuables. And then selling them on the black market. Via Viridian and Lazulite, who were also the people he did the most work for by far. But he wasn’t a smuggler! Just, very involved in the smuggling  _ business. _ Honestly the anxiety was undeserved, he really wasn’t a smuggler since he never left Mantle despite the Vespids repeatedly asking him to. While he did work for them sometimes, he didn’t  _ work for them. _ They paid him freelance, on a job to job basis. He always had the right to refuse a job, because they were requests and not orders. 

Adam did not take orders. Not anymore. 

“Heya Seth, if you’re not too busy today my brother wanted to talk to you about some favor or another he needed, he should be in the back office. You know the way, yeah?” Viridian played the part of friendly bartender well, partly because it was barely an act. But there was a reason Viridian was the face of their operations while Lazulite was the brains, and Viridian’s talent for warping truth into whatever he needed and masking lies inside of mistakes was a big part of it. 

“Viridian, I know the floor plan better than  _ you _ do at this point,” Adam said with nary a hint of sarcasm as he turned on the spot to head for the back office. He hadn’t even come to a stop on his way to the bar before Viridian had leaned over it, flashed that smirk of his, and twitched his antennae at him with the same kind of energy you’d get with an exaggerated eyebrow waggle. As he walked away, he yelled out over his shoulder, “I can feel you staring at my ass, Viridian,” with zero regard for the half crowded bar they were standing in. Nearly every faunus in Mantle came here at some point, so nearly every faunus in Mantle was  _ well _ aware of Viridian’s shameless flirting with Seth Umber. When he’d first started fooling around with Viridian he hadn’t actually expected it to come with an extra layer of cover to his identity; Seth Umber was slowly gaining a reputation for being a lot of things that contradicted the actions he committed under his mask. Adam was pretty sure that the Atlas police file on Seth Umber had him marked as almost certainly involved with the smuggling ring known to be somehow connected to the Frozen Lily, which was good for him because it made them far less likely to connect his identity to the various murders he’d committed. 

He hadn’t been kidding about knowing the bar’s layout, though; he could have found the office with his eye closed, and he actually did close his eye for a minute just to test it. He also knew, though, that ‘the back office’ didn’t mean their office at all; it meant the extremely well hidden secret passage that led to the underground rooms where they handled a lot of their illegal business. Mantle was an old,  _ old _ city, and for all its relative modernity the remnants of its past were never very far; without the option of expanding further into the tundra due to weather conditions, lack of resources and the omnipresent threat of grimm, Mantle had always been forced to make do with the space they had. Buildings would be reused, built on top of, fixed up sloppily or simply left empty until it was needed again. Population shifts meant different areas would go empty for years and years, sometimes even generations, and instead of refurbishing the ancient and half buried buildings they’d simply be built on top of. Sometimes there was a disaster, and the city had come close to collapsing, and after Mantle recovered they just paved over the rubble and got to building. This led to something very useful for the criminal parts of Mantle in the modern day, and it was a contributing factor towards illegal businesses  _ only _ operating on Mantle; every building was sitting on top of a ruined network of countless other buildings, forgotten rooms and hallways stretching down through both the ice and through time. If you had some equipment, privacy, and gumption, you could go to any basement in Mantle and find your way into some forgotten memory in no time. 

The network was near impossible to map due to its sheer size as well as its instability; this was less a buried city you were navigating than it was about three thousand years worth of useless and broken architecture that got buried because it was easier than properly taking care of it. Still, though, it had its uses and then some, especially if you needed to be halfway across Mantle in an hour with a crate of stolen Dust where there weren’t any cameras to track you. 

Adam had to remember the answer to the stupidly complicated lock puzzle the Vespids used to keep their tunnel hidden, but he’d done it so many times that he could probably do it in his sleep. He had to fiddle with a bunch of grimy bottles on an old wine rack in a store room that had last been used about three owners ago, but when the rack slid back and swung open to reveal the dimly lit tunnel its hinges didn’t even make a sound; this room was very well kept, and its disuse was a careful illusion. Adam walked on in and kicked the door shut with his foot, knowing the other bottles were stuck in place with a plant based epoxy that just so happened to perfectly resemble the kind of crust you’d expect if a wine bottle broke eighty years ago and nobody bothered to clean them all up. 

Didn’t take him long to find Lazulite once he made it through the cramped tunnel and into the first forgotten room, since there were only half a dozen of them in use. Room number one was empty save for some crates and boxes full of rations, and Adam knew better than to yell for Lazulite so he continued onwards. The connected room was covered wall to wall in maps of the tunnels, and the only exit was in fact another tunnel that sloped somewhat sharply downwards and went on for quite a bit. It led to a very brightly lit room, and it was a large one; it must have been a factory floor at some point in the past, before it had been buried, but now it was an artificial field. Lazulite was here, his wings lit up like a shattered rainbow under the sunlamps as he walked carefully through different rows of plants with a watering can; Viridian used his semblance to grow all sorts of things from ingredients for bar food to poisons and drugs for the black market, and even food crops. But there was a limit to what his semblance could do, so they had to at least keep conditions down here tolerable for plant life. 

“Viridian said you had a job for me,” Adam sat quietly. They were a fair ways down at this point, so he probably didn’t have to, but it was always better safe than sorry. Although this was not an attitude he’d had in the past, he’d been forced to learn it along with everything else he’d picked up since his intimate waltz with death. 

Lazulite barely glanced up at him for half a second. “Yeah gimme a minute,” he mumbled as he went back to carefully walking through the various rows of buds and sprouts and who knew what. He was clearly moving in a specific pattern, the look of focus on his face enough for Adam to guess that they had a very meticulous watering schedule for all of this. Adam leaned against a bit of wall that wasn’t filled with shelves of seeds and fertilizers and pots, something very hard to find down here, and waited. He could have waited patiently, he’d long since mastered that in his assassination endeavors, but considering he’d only come to the bar for a drink and had been none-too-subtly roped into coming down here Adam wasn’t in the mood to be patient. Still though, wasn’t much he could do, so wait he did. Lazulite took another six minutes to finish watering what needed it and carefully avoiding everything that was growing, but then he left the field they’d dug out in the middle of this huge open floor and put the watering can down on one of the nearly infinite shelves that lined the walls. “This isn’t the type of job you’re going to like, Seth,” Lazulite said as he approached Adam’s little leaning spot with a grim sort of expression. “It’s one I don’t like, and it’s one Viridian doesn’t like, but it’s still one that needs doing.”

Adam just stared at Lazulite, his arms crossed and the fingers of his right hand drumming a pattern into the soft leather of his coat sleeve. “So you’re dumping it on me because you don’t want to do it?” he asked with the barest hint of sarcasm; he knew that Lazulite never offered him a job he didn’t think would fit Adam’s skills, but it was also abundantly clear already that whatever this job was, it was being offered to him for a reason that had nothing to do with his skills. They did this sometimes, asked him to do something for them to try and teach him something or other; they desperately wanted him to work for them permanently, and they were far from above using underhanded manipulation to try and convince him it was a good idea. “Tell me what it is and how much it pays, and you’ll get an answer.” That was how this worked, and that was how it was going to stay no matter how hard they tried to goad him into signing on for good. 

Lazulite crossed his own arms, wings fluttering in annoyance as he huffed. “I’m asking you to do it because you’re pretty much our last shot, here. It’s a debt collection, see-” Adam pushed off the wall and turned to walk out, and he probably would have if Lazulite hadn’t zipped in front of him damn near faster than he could blink. “ _ Listen, _ ” Lazulite said with an expression that told Adam that he was close to wearing out a patience he’d thought was infinite; this job must have been hounding them worse than he’d thought. “I’m not asking you to rough them up, damn it, I’m asking you to see if they can even pay up at  _ all. _ ” Lazulite huffed, eyes glancing elsewhere as he muttered. “I’ll tell you anything you wanna know, but the bare bones of it is that we can’t bring ourselves to hurt them for the money they owe us, and everyone else we could send would either agree with us and let them go, or beat the shit out of them. You’re impartial, and you genuinely don’t give a shit if humans have a hard time, so we wanna send you to judge whether they’d have a hard time if they paid us, or if they  _ actually can’t. _ ” Lazulite uncrossed his arms and looked like he wanted to rest a hand on Adam’s shoulders, but thought better of it and simply stepped aside. “So, what’ll it be?”

Adam sighed too, bringing a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Alright, fine,” he bit out as he lowered his hand and glared at Lazulite with all the irritation he could muster. “I’ll go and see. But I have questions.” 

Lazulite nodded, and gestured at Adam for him to follow as he walked towards the tunnel that led to the map room. “Of course, of course. What do you wanna know?”

Adam followed without hesitation, but he kept his voice quiet as they hiked up the incline of the dirt tunnel. “I thought you guys didn’t do tabs for this kinda thing. What the hell did they even buy from you?” His breathing was even despite the mild effort of the short climb. 

Lazulite hummed in contemplation, his wings resting limply against his back like a cloak as he climbed. “We don’t, for the most part. Potential buyers place a request, we get them their item, and we trade off for the money nice and discreetly. Sometimes they’ll pay us in advance and we deliver what they need, sometimes we do other things. Versatility and flexibility are a must in this line of work,” he said. The climb came to an end and they entered the map room, where Lazulite pulled up a couple of rickety stools and sat down at the central table which was covered in a crude map of their smuggling network. He gestured for Adam to sit too, and after pressing his boot down on one of the rungs to test it Adam sat down gingerly. “This was more of an urgent kind of matter, though. They needed their item  _ quickly, _ quicker than they could get the money for it. So we accepted a down payment in exchange for it, after which they were to pay us the rest over time.” Lazulite chuckled. “Obviously that didn’t happen.”

Adam looked over the map with a mild curiosity. It was crude as all hell and barely legible, but it didn’t need to be; it was a map of the network of rooms down here, and as such it didn’t have to be to scale, all it had to do was show which rooms connected to which. It was frightfully easy to get lost in these old catacombs and ruins, and if you got lost odds were good you’d never be found. “What was the ‘item’ they needed so badly?” Adam asked with the most sarcastic air quotes he could muster. 

Lazulite leaned back on his stool a bit, wings fanning backwards at an angle. His face looked contemplative, almost bored. “There’s an animal in Vacuo that’s considered a delicacy, but if it’s prepared wrong it can be poisonous. Turns out, that poison has a very specific antidote, and it’s a plant that only grows in Vacuo. There’s a Vacuan restaurant we supply, but we don’t smuggle animals or meats, too costly. So when their kid got a bad batch of whatever the hell that restaurant was serving, he got sick.” Lazulite tilted forward, hands on his knees as he leaned in close. “Now, I want you to understand something; the plant this antidote is made from, it’s grown in greenhouses up in Atlas. We aren’t the only option, and the poison itself isn’t very lethal, but it will make you miserable.” Then he sighed and leaned back again. “Of course, Atlas isn’t very keen on selling limited, hard to grow medical supplies to Mantle, so it’s expensive as hell down here, and this family didn’t have insurance. Their son had been sick for a week and he wasn’t getting better, and they couldn’t afford to buy the medicine legit. So they looked to the black market.”

Adam snorted. “Yeah, well, it looks like they couldn’t afford it there, either. Which, by the way, why are you selling something cheaper than market price, especially something that’s legally available? Volume can only do so much to offset the cost.” Lazulite raised a brow at him, and it took a minute for him to realize the answer for himself. “You grow it yourself for next to nothing, right?” 

Lazulite nodded. “Yeah, with Riddy’s semblance we’ve been able to corner the market on plant based products with ease. But it’s a semblance, not  _ magic, _ and he’s only one person. He could walk into that room and make that entire field harvest ready in a minute, maybe two, but the aura drain is unreal. If his aura shatters he’s out for the rest of the day, and his recharge isn’t great even if it doesn’t break. He can’t feed all of Mantle with it, and when it comes to drugs and medicines we still have to actually  _ process _ it. So believe me when I say that making this antidote wasn’t free of cost, and to top it all off the demand for it is insanely low. This family was pretty much the only buyer we’ve ever had for it.”

“Well, was the down payment enough to cover the cost of production? Cause if so, then why even bother with these people? Do you really need the money that badly?” As far as Adam was aware, the Vespid brothers weren’t exactly strapped for cash; between the bar and the smuggling, while they couldn’t afford a place in Atlas, they weren’t regarded as one of the five biggest smuggling rings in Mantle for nothing. “Plus,” he added with a scowl, “I still don’t know what exactly it is you even want me  _ doing _ here. I don’t do debt collections, Lazulite, I don’t exactly have a wealth of experience to draw from.”

Lazulite scoffed and rested his left elbow on the table, his chin in his hand and his wings fanned out behind him in a way Adam somehow knew was meant to be condescending. “Already told you, you’re not roughing them up for money. You’re gonna go down there, be your usual very scary self, and ask them if they have the money. If they do and they give it to you, hooray for them! You bring it back and everything’s fine. If not, tell ‘em it’s fine.” Lazulite sat up. “Then let them know you’re gonna search their house to make sure they’re not stashing shit somewhere. It’ll upset them, make them nervous, but you’ll be able to get a look see and make an informed decision on whether or not they’re worth hassling. Either way, you get paid a grand and a half when you come back.”

Adam grunted. That wasn’t insignificant, especially for something so easy. “If they tell me they don’t have it, and I decide they’re worth hassling, what happens to them?” 

Lazulite smirked. “Do you care?”

He thought about it for a second, shrugged, and said “I guess not. Give me their address, I’ll take care of it.” 

Lazulite nodded and yanked open a drawer on the table they were sitting next to, pulling out a pencil and a yellowed sheathe of old paper. He scribbled the details down and tore it off, handing the scrap over to Adam with a raised brow. “Remember, we’re not interested in their sob stories; you’re there to find out how much they’re worth and let us know. Whatever happens after that, well. That’s  _ our _ business.”

Adam took the scrap of paper, glancing at it for a moment and finding to his surprise that Lazulite’s handwriting was nothing short of gorgeous, and slipped it into his pocket to look at once he left. “And that, Lazulite, is one of many reasons why I’m never going to sign up to work for you full time. Not my business, not my fault.” He stood up and waved a very dismissive goodbye as he headed back through the ration room to the old storage cellar. The secret door was a lot less impressive from this side, there was just a button he had to press to disengage the locks that were hidden inside the door anyways. It was silent as always, and he closed it much more gently this time. He took a detour on the way back to the main floor of the bar to actually stop by their office so he could steal one of their pens. He stuck it in his mouth to chew on and headed back to the bar. 

“Thanks for dropping by, Se- is that my pen?!” Viridian leaned over the bar, antennae twitching and almost reaching for him as he stared at the pen being ground on by Adam’s teeth. 

“Yyyyup,” Adam said as clearly as he could. He didn’t even pause in his steps, he just continued walking. “Figured you wouldn’t mind,” he said. He paused, then, and turned around to look Viridian in the eyes. His expression was mostly confusion, and a tiny smidgen of indignation. Adam reached up slowly, and pulled the pen out of his mouth in such a way that his lip was pulled down a bit before the pen slid free. “You know, since you enjoyed seeing my mouth full so much the other night?” Viridian’s face flushed a deep, almost alarming shade of red, and Adam popped the pen back into his mouth with a smirk. With that, he turned and walked out of the bar. Once he was outside, though, the smirk slid from his face, although he waited until he was a block away to take the pen out of his mouth and toss it into a storm drain. He was getting better at those types of remarks, but it was still kinda weird. It definitely had the desired effect, though; as long as Adam kept this fling going, the benefits would only grow. Plus the other night  _ was _ a lot of fun, certainly more than he’d expected it to be. Those first couple of meetups had been nice and all, but they hadn’t done too much for him. 

Adam paused under a street light and fished out the slip of paper with the address on it. Didn’t seem to be too far away, honestly, but he’d have to hurry if he wanted to make it before the family was likely to go to bed. Then again, if he took his time, waking them up would make it harder for them to lie to him, harder to hide things. 

While he contemplated matters, Adam was still standing in the street at night in a residential area, and the resident of the ground floor apartment he was in front of took exception to his presence. “Hey!” a rough voice called out, pulling Adam from his thoughts. He whipped his head around, arm poised to flick Delta into place should it be needed, and looked to see where the noise had come from. He saw little more than a human in a shabby yellow coat leaning out of their rickety front door, a bat in one hand as they held onto the door handle with the other. “Get-” the human stopped mid sentence, and Adam was already sick of this shit because he knew exactly what they’d just seen. Seth Umber didn’t wear a mask, after all; most faunus in Mantle barely gave his brand a passing glance, most of them familiar with similar sights. Humans, on the other hand, usually reacted in one of three ways; they’d feel bad and pity would flood their eyes and Adam would have to leave before he got violent, they’d be horrified and look sort of sick and Adam would have to leave before he got violent, or they’d get exceptionally angry at him for any number of complicated and often personal reasons and Adam would have to leave before he got violent. 

The stranger stared, wind taken out of their sails, and they just stood there. Looked like it was reaction number one, judging by the way they practically deflated. “Just. Get out of here,” they mumbled before they ducked back into their apartment to hide. Adam scoffed, and tucked the paper back into his pocket with one last derisive glare at the window they’d seen him from. 

Eager to get away and needing to burn off some particularly irritated energy, Adam decided to hurry on over to the address he’d been given before the family went to bed. It wasn’t quite night, but the day was certainly over, and being the second week of January there weren’t many people walking around outside. There were stragglers, though, and every last one of them took a single look at Adam’s face and crossed the street to avoid him. The humans likely did it because of his brand, but the faunus probably avoided him because he had a weapon, he looked pissed, and he wasn’t putting on an act at the moment so the general air he gave off was, well…. One that was better to avoid. 

When the apartment came into view, Adam paused; he contemplated putting his mask on, but decided against it since he very explicitly wasn’t here to be violent. The family lived in a fairly average looking apartment building, honestly not too dissimilar to his own; the front door led to a shabby lobby with a wall of mailboxes, and there was even an intercom system so he could buzz up and let someone know he was coming. Half the buttons looked worn out, though, and several of the nameplates were missing; didn’t matter, since Adam knew which floor and apartment he was here for and he definitely didn’t want them to know he was on his way. 

Adam made his way up two flights of stairs and down a hall with an almost clean looking carpet before coming up to the door he was here for; it was a gross looking off-white, like it was white a long time ago and had lost that color over the years, and the number 307 was barely legible on the grimy metal placard that sat above the peep-hole. Adam sighed, raised his hand, and rapped at the wooden door with the back of his knuckles. It didn’t take too long for him to hear the sounds of someone on the other side, and he did his best to be just barely in view. 

“Um, hello?” asked whoever it was that came to answer his knock. They sounded young. “Is there something I can do for you?” 

Leaning further into view with a sigh and a mild attempt at suppressing a scowl, Adam turned so that the hilt of Euphrates was visible over his shoulder. “Yeah, I need to talk to your dad.” Adam reached into his pocket and pulled the paper out again, holding it up to his good eye as he read the name Lazulite had given him. “Silen Bartleby, he live here?” He lowered the scrap and gazed into the peephole. He was the very picture of nonchalant, bordering on bored. 

There was a long moment of silence before the voice spoke up again. “I’ll go get him.” They were definitely young, but not all that much younger than Adam was; he’d hazard a guess at around fourteen, maybe? They sounded worried, which was honestly the proper reaction to all of this. 

In stark contrast to the wait for that response, the door opened up a crack less than ten seconds later, and Adam caught a glimpse of a messy, short beard the color of tar and skin that you could mistake for a tan if Mantle ever got any sun. “Who are you? What do you want?” His voice wasn’t gruff so much as it was haggard, like he’d spent the past ten years shouting at the top of his lungs and was almost out of a voice entirely. 

Delta slid into his palm with the slightest flick, and the blade snicked into place with a brush of his thumb. Adam stepped close and slid the blade through the gap between the door and the frame, and as Silen stepped back in fear he swung up and snapped the flimsy chain preventing him from pushing the door the rest of the way open, which he did so with a casual shove as he stowed Delta away. “My name’s Seth,” he said as he shut the door behind him and locked the deadbolt. “I’m here to-”

The words died in Adam’s throat when he turned around to look at Silen; he was pretty scrawny, all things considered, not too tall and his hair was as short and messy as his beard. But what stopped Adam dead in his tracks wasn’t Silen’s face, or his shabby clothes, or the mottled scar that ran up his right cheek; it was the mismatched pair of curled horns that framed the side of his head. Ram horns, and fairly large ones, although while the left horn was two and a half tight loops big the right one had been snapped off halfway through its first. 

Swallowing the sudden lump in his throat, Adam finished his sentence. “I’m here about a debt you owe.” To his credit, or his shame depending on his mood at any given moment, Adam’s voice didn’t betray a single emotion that he didn’t want it to. He sounded as cold and collected as he had from the start. 

Silen looked about ready to fall over, but he stood his ground. “This is about the, the medicine?” He sounded even more haggard than before, not that Adam blamed him. “L-look, we’re working on it! But Azi is still unwell, and Flora and I can only do so much work! Jupiter, she’s only fourteen she can’t work, it’s all we can do just to keep the kids fed! You gotta believe me,” Silen said with a desperate look in his eyes, “you’ll  _ get _ the money. We just need time, for Azi to finish recovering.”

“Yeah, that’s not exactly news,” Adam said with the same tone of voice he’d used for much more harrowing situations. He walked further into the apartment, casting his gaze this way and that. The kid who’d answered the door, Jupiter apparently, was standing over by a doorway that must have led to her room or something; the apartment was barely any bigger than Adam’s, and even had a similar open kitchen kinda thing going on, and he could only see four doors connected to the living room and one of them had to be the bathroom. The girl was human, at least, and she looked pretty scared of him. He ignored her, and turned back to Silen. “I’m not here for a sob story, Silen, I’m here to make sure you’re not sitting on something that’s worth enough for my friends to be mad about.” 

Adam walked into the kitchen and ignored Silen’s sputtering. He opened the fridge, letting out a neutral grunt as he saw the contents; looked about right, if they were sinking most of their meager money into it. He closed it and started looking through the cabinets, finding mostly canned goods and a loaf of bread, plus a lot more pans and dishes than he thought they could have possibly needed. Still, though, it was all cheap as hell and looked like more of a pack ratting issue than a splurging one. 

Heading back into the living room, Adam continued to ignore Silen who was just quietly fidgeting and trying to be sneaky as he stepped closer to the girl, as if to protect her without Adam noticing. Adam had his head half buried in the television stand, checking the cupboard on the bottom for valuables and finding only movies when he spoke up. “You seem awful protective, Silen,” Adam said as he stood back up and turned to stare coldly at him. “I find it strange, don’t you? That you care so much,” he took a step closer and watched as the girl tried to hide behind him, Silen’s face hardening with a mixture of determination and fear. 

“She’s my  _ daughter, _ ” Silen said with a steely tone to his voice. His determined expression melted into shock when Adam laughed at him, a harsh and vicious sound that Adam forced through a smirk as cold as iron. 

“Really?” he asked with that same cold smirk on his face. “See, where I’m standing, she looks like a human!” That smirk vanished, and so did the fake mirth he’d been forcing into his voice. His next sentence carried all the bitterness and disgust he could muster. “ _ You _ , meanwhile, look like a traitor. Or would you prefer coward?” There was a bubbling pit of emotions boiling away inside of him, but these ones he knew by name. Disgust and anger, bitterness, indignity, they were old friends of his. 

Silen didn’t seem to like his attitude, unfortunately, because he took a step forward and glared at him. “She’s my wife’s daughter, Seth,” he said angrily, “that makes her  _ my _ daughter. And I don’t appreciate your tone.”

Adam answered Seth’s approach with one of his own, stepping into Silen’s personal bubble with a snarl. “Did you even wait, Silen?” he asked as he stared Silen in the eyes, rage boiling behind his own. “Did you even  _ wait _ for your parents to die, or did they have to put on smiles and play pretend at your wedding, act like they belonged in a room full of humans making jokes about  _ flea dip _ for your registry?” It took more than Adam would like to admit to resist the urge to spit in Silen’s face when his face contorted in rage. Rage that Adam found to be the height of hypocrisy. 

“What is  _ wrong _ with you?!” Silen asked more loudly than he perhaps intended. 

Adam scoffed and stepped back, turning around to go check the bathroom. “Less than you,” he said. The bathroom was tiny as hell, but Adam had barely given it a once-over before he got the surprise of his life when Silen grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him around to face him. Silen opened his mouth to berate him but never got the chance, because Adam grabbed his wrist and  _ pulled, _ yanking Silen forwards so sharply that he lost his balance and his face slammed into the door frame. Adam neatly side stepped Silen’s recoiling form, watching impassionately as he clutched at his forehead in pain. 

“Silen?!” The voice that rang out wasn’t the one that had answered the door, although it did sound like a woman’s. The door furthest from the kitchen yanked open, and a human woman with straw colored hair and a casual workman’s outfit stepped into the living room. She had to have heard Adam enter, the place was so small, but while she’d been content to hide up to that point the sound of Silen face planting into the wall was enough to draw her out. Silen ducked to the side and moved past Adam, rushing over to his wife with his arm already outstretched to rest his hand on her shoulder in comfort. 

“I’m fine, I’m fine, I just smacked into the door frame,” he said softly, and Adam glanced at their ‘daughter’ to see if she would correct him. She was still staring at him, and she didn’t say a word. “Go back ins-” Silen was interrupted when Adam marched over to him and then past him, walking into the room his wife had just left. 

“This your room, Silen?” Adam asked in a cold monotone. He looked inside the room, finding that it was in fact the master bedroom. What he hadn’t expected to see was their little boy curled up on the bed on top of a makeshift nest of blankets and pillows. The boy just stared at him, looking miserable but awake and aware. 

While he didn’t dare touch Adam again, Silen got pretty close to it when he pushed his way into the room to go sit by his adopted son. With his gaze locked onto Adam, he rubbed at his son’s back to try and calm him down. “Are you satisfied yet?” Silen asked with all the empty exhaustion his face displayed. 

Taking a moment to look around the shabby yet cramped bedroom, Adam finally nodded. “Yeah, sure.” Adam took a step back and looked at the wife, Flora he was pretty sure. “Did he even tell you where he got the medicine? Or did you just praise him for being a good little boy-toy?” 

The look on her face wasn’t what he expected; disgust he was prepared for, but the white hot rage was a surprise. “Get the fuck out of my house.” She pointed at the front door, and Adam almost smiled. Adam turned around and walked across the tiny living room with a shrug, although he stopped just before the door to turn and say one last thing. 

“Your door chain is broken, by the way.” Adam opened the door and flicked at the dangling chain, the shattered link clacking against the frame. When he shut the door behind him, he slammed it. 

The walk back to the Frozen Lily was uneventful, save for the hurricane of thoughts that raged within Adam’s head. First was the actual job, going over everything he’d seen in the apartment to judge if they were living well enough to be worth hassling for the rest of their debt. Honestly, Adam didn’t think so; the only things that looked to have been bought in the past month was the food, and he recognized a  _ lot _ of the items and brands from his own pantry so he knew for a fact that they weren’t exactly good for you and they were very very cheap. Nutritional value was something you only worried about if you didn’t have to worry about how you were going to fill your stomach when it was empty. Adam wasn’t exactly strapped for cash either, but almost all of the money he got a hold of went into his weapons, his gear, bribes, or other illicit things that furthered his goals in murdering the people he’d put on his list. That family, on the other hand, seemed to be struggling significantly, and Adam highly doubted they’d reach a point of financial stability any time soon between the embargo taking a fat shit on the economy in general and their son’s less than stellar health. It wasn’t worth it, and he was going to tell the Vespids to cut their losses. 

With that squared away, though, Adam couldn’t stop his thoughts from turning towards everything else that had happened. Why did Lazulite tell him they were human when the father was a faunus? There was no way he wasn’t aware of it, and there was no way Adam wasn’t going to find out immediately, so why bother with the deception at all? Did he want Adam to have that moment, where the horns turned his blood to ice before it flash boiled in rage? Did he just not want to give Adam time to come to terms with what he was walking into? Did he even know Adam would feel so strongly about this? Well, that was an easy enough answer, there was no way in hell Lazulite thought Adam would be unbothered by it. It was true that he no longer viewed humans as scum, as enemies. Humans could be good people, he knew this now. But that didn’t mean he  _ liked _ them; a human would have to prove they were decent, no amount of personal progress and philosophical change would get Adam to trust a human to be decent by default. He’d rather avoid contact with humans if he could help it, at least if they were strangers; Pietro was a good example of learning ahead of time, from other faunus, that a specific human was a good person and going in with trust already built. 

The idea that a faunus, in  _ Mantle, _ would choose to marry a woman, choose to become  _ family _ with humans…. It would have been easier, if he hated it just because they were human, just because of their species. But humans weren’t like faunus, they weren’t just a species; humans ran the world, and it was not a kind one. From the culture to the laws, humanity dominated the space that faunus lived in, and there were precious few places you could go and not be under the grasp of a human system. Everything in Mantle, in Atlas, everywhere except Menagerie, it was built and designed and intended for humans, and the faunus were an afterthought at best. Faunus were unified in this way, in this commonality; the world around them was not made for them, it often clashed against them or hurt them, and the very laws themselves were made to keep them in place. Yes, humans suffered under these laws too but it was  _ nothing _ compared to what the faunus had to struggle with. So for a faunus to marry a human wasn’t just a matter of marrying someone, it was a matter of slotting themselves ever deeper into a system designed to hurt their peers, it was a matter of trying to fit in more easily so you could escape the injustices that were going to continue. 

It was a matter of abandonment. And abandonment was something Adam  **_hated._ **

Did he regret his actions? The fear he’d instilled in those innocent children, the strife he’d caused, the damage he’d done? Did he regret coming into their already delicate lives and smashing some of the precious little stability they had? Or was he satisfied when that girl shrunk backwards in fear, when Silen looked about ready to cry from frustration and fear and exhaustion, when Flora stood there with rage in her eyes but fear in her heart? Adam Taurus, the man who had stalked his ex lover across the face of Remnant, who had tried to kill her, who had slaughtered hundreds of innocent people in the name of vengeance, died in that cave behind a waterfall. He got up, and he survived, but the person he used to be was gone, and he was someone different now. But a single, burning question made itself known in the depths of his soul and the foundation of his mind: Who was he now?

He didn’t know the answer. 

When he finally pulled himself from his maelstrom of thoughts, Adam realized he’d walked past the Frozen Lily by half a dozen blocks and had to double back, struggling desperately to keep himself from falling back into the currents of doubt and fear that raged within him. The bar was almost the same as he’d left it when he got back, rather full of drunken fools with Viridian manning the bar and Lazulite nowhere to be seen. Viridian saw him pretty quickly, but Adam just licked his lips and Viridian’s cheeks lit up with the color of roses and he busied himself with cleaning the already spotless counter, his antennae folded down against his face. Adam made his way to the back rooms with a flirtatious little wave that Viridian steadfastly ignored, and then he was headed down through the secret door into the maze beneath the bar. 

Lazulite was in the map room, wings fluttering and occasionally buzzing softly as he rummaged through a box full of papers, looking for something. He glanced up at Adam when he walked in but paid him little mind as he continued to look for whatever he was trying to find. Adam just sat down on a stool and waited; it didn’t take too much longer until Lazulite pulled a sheet of paper out of the box and walked over to the table and put it down. From what Adam could see it looked like a truly ancient blueprint or floor plan or something, presumably for one of the buried buildings down here. “So,” Lazulite said casually like he was asking about the weather, “what’s the verdict? Are we gonna have to take care of some business, or should we just give up?”

Adam just sighed. “From what I saw, it’s not worth the time it would take to get your money’s worth; better to cut and run. The kid is still sick from something or another, and until he gets better they won’t be able to save anything up to pay you back.”

Lazulite frowned. “Well, damn.” He reached up and scratched at his chin, his eyes drifting up to the ceiling as he thought. They flicked back down to focus on Adam as he asked “You think the boy’s condition is the only reason?”

While curious about the line of questioning, Adam answered honestly like he was being paid to. “Even if he got better, I doubt it would make much of a difference. This entire endeavor was a bad idea if you ask me, they never would have been able to pay you back and I’m honestly shocked they even managed the down payment.”

With a disappointed and weary sigh, Lazulite sat down as well and rested his forearms on the table with his wings almost touching the floor. “Fuck.” He looked at Adam, expression sullen. “That’s it then, yeah? We just gotta dump the rest of the batch and write it off as a loss?”

Adam sat up a little straighter. “The rest of the batch?” 

Lazulite nodded. “Yeah, the rest of the medicine we made. We were gonna give the rest of it to Silen when he paid the rest of the bill, since the down payment was only enough for about half a dose.” Lazulite leaned back, pushing off the table with a buzz of exertion. “It was enough to get the kid in stable condition, he should be fine, but…” He reached up and scratched his chin again. “Fuck, I really thought we’d be able to move the rest of it. I honestly thought Silen was the kinda guy to save cash up in secret, thought he’d bust it all out to save his kid. Guess I was wrong.” Lazulite shrugged and slid off his stool while Adam struggled to process the knowledge that the Vespids had intentionally under-dosed a poisoned child as a form of insurance. “Welp. That’s my bad. You want your payment in cash or account transfer?” 

He didn’t stand up. “How much did Silen owe for the rest of it?” Why was he asking this, fuck, he knew what he was doing but not  _ why- _ “If it’s not more than what you were gonna pay me, then keep the money and give him the medicine. Seems a shame to just burn it, and I can hardly call this a  _ job. _ ” Fuck. Fuck, he really was doing this. 

Lazulite stilled, not even his wings moving for a scant few moments. Then he smiled. “It’d be enough, yeah. You sure about this?” Well, it was nice of Lazulite to give him an out at least. Shame he couldn’t bring himself to take it. 

“Yeah,” Adam said as he stood up and dusted his pants with a brush of his hands. “Any lien left over, though, put it on my tab with you. I’ve got some things I’m gonna need sometime soon, and you’re the best option I have for getting them.” 

“Of course, of course. Well,” Lazulite said with a happy little flutter of his wings, “I’ll be seeing you, Seth. Try not to give Riddy an aneurysm on the way out this time.”

Adam left Lazulite to his maps and his plans with a nod, and made his way back to the bar. Viridian waved at him, antennae twitching in time with his wave, and Adam waggled his fingers back without stopping. When he got to the doors, though, he stopped and turned around, waiting until Viridian looked back up and saw him. 

Then he stuck his tongue against the inside of his cheek to make it bulge, wiggled it a bit, waggled his brows, and tried not to laugh when Viridian flushed from his antennae to his collar and almost broke a glass. A nod wasn’t a tacit agreement, and he’d take that to court if he had to. 

**Author's Note:**

> This time it didn't take me a whole week but I did take a break. Also, uh. Man there's a lot I could say here, honestly, this one was kind of a struggle and also a blast. Adam is really struggling in this one, and I honestly think that acts of generosity are borderline painful for him. This is also the beginning of an exploration into my original characters who, while initially presented as freedom fighter type rogues, are in fact genuinely criminal overlords who run a very large smuggling ring and are not, necessarily, strictly good people. They're not evil, for sure, but. 
> 
> Well you can't make an omlette without cracking a few eggs, as they say. Sucks that the eggs are people but hey, they gotta make an omlette. What are you gonna do?


End file.
